The Use and Abuse of Cambridge University's Ten-Year Divinity Statute

Ambition, Anxiety and Aspiration: the use and abuse of Cambridge University’s Ten-Year Divinity Statute. This paper examines the market for and motivation of those who made use of a little-known Cambridge University statute which, in effect, offered a low-cost distance learning degree until 1858. It shows how non-graduates, both clerical and lay, attempted to use its provisions to enhance their status, facilitate career advancement and insulate themselves against status slippage, a problem that became acute in the second decade of the nineteenth century as the reinvigorated universities reasserted their role as educators of the clergy and as the bishops increasingly denied ordination to those educated outside their sphere. In doing so we can observe how the desires of non-graduate clergy to take degrees, and the attempts of liberally-educated non-graduates to enter the pulpits of the established Church, were responded to both by the university which received them and more broadly by the print discourse which critiqued their ambitions. The tensions revealed are relevant not just for understanding something of how the clergy were developing as an occupational group, and the tensions caused by the changing supplies of graduates, but also reflect more generally the status anxieties of the elites and middling sorts as they faced down fears of competition for cultural and economic privilege appendant to educational opportunities. The ten-year divinity statute: interpretation and reputation. Distance learning has a long pedigree at Cambridge University. A papal dispensation allowing monks and friars to proceed to the degree of bachelor of divinity, without first taking a degree in the arts was, in spirit, to survive the reformation. Under the Elizabethan statutes of 1570, men aged over twenty-four, who had not graduated in the arts, were permitted to enrol for the bachelor of divinity degree, to which they could proceed after ten years of membership.1 It was from this requirement that these students gained their popular name ‘ten-year men’.2 Although a requirement to reside might have been implicitly assumed it was not explicitly stated and indeed for most of the eighteenth century it appears that no minimum period of residence was enforced. D. A. Winstanley, historian of the university, gives the example of John Boutflower, who took the degree of B.D. in 1787, for whom there is no evidence of residence.3 It may have been his example, as well as the realisation that increasing numbers of men were either being admitted to colleges or, more obviously, taking their degrees,4 which led to a 1788 ruling by the Heads of Houses that ten-year men should reside ‘the greater part of three several terms’ in the two years previous to proceeding to B.D.,5 a requirement that lasted until the degree’s abolition in 1858. If the residence requirements were interpreted in a flexible way, so too were the necessary academic exercises. In theory these were identical to those required for the B.D. taken by the normal route, that is via B.A. and M.A. degrees. The major requirement was keeping a divinity act in the schools, followed by the delivery of two sermons in University Church, one in English and one in Latin.6 Whilst in theory challenging, the result of allowing men with limited access to books and no overall supervision or guidance in their studies to undergo the exercises seems to have been an admission that not much could be expected of them. In 1825 pamphleteer and Cambridge college member, Philotheologus, claimed that the materials needed to perform the exercises ‘are, and may, be furnished ready cut and dried for the use of the candidate’, but despite this ten-year men 1 performed so poorly that undergraduates viewed the divinity school as a ‘temple of fun and frolic’.7 From the same period John Martin Frederick Wright’s Alma Mater, 1827, offered the story of a man returning from war with France who had enrolled himself as a ten-year man at Trinity Hall. Having associated with a ‘gay-set’, fixed on merry-making and cruel fun, this unprepared scholar was the centre of attention when performing his divinity act: ‘At length the scene became so droll, and the mirth so indecorous that the Professor was constrained to pronounce aloud – Descendas’, signifying failure and thus calling a halt to the proceedings.8 That undergraduates of the eighteen-twenties misprized ten-year men is confirmed by John Purcell Fitzgerald in his biography of ten-year man and Clapham sect associate, John Charlesworth: ‘In our time of undergraduate ignorance, we used to look down with a kind of contempt on those who “came up” to College as “ten years’ men”. Their flowing sleeves, as we thought, covered their incapacity to pass one of our examinations.’9 Modern scholarship has rarely noticed the ten-year man and when it has, it has adopted this negative assessment. 10 It is, then, worth noting a contemporary counter-view. The Morning Chronicle printed a letter in 1825 from a writer claiming to have been resident in college for almost twenty years, who asserted that the difference between ten-year men and regular university men was negligible.11 Biographical and bibliographical research shows that many were hardworking scholars before admission, that they often spent long hours in their studies whilst students, and that many were active, publishing scholars in later life. Before admission, Thomas Hartwell Horne’s encyclopaedic knowledge of divinity literature had been demonstrated in his Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures (1818), a book which was recommended by bishops to ordinands.12 The value of Cornelius Bayley’s Hebrew grammar, An Entrance into the Sacred Tongue (1778) had been recognised by the award of an honorary degree by the University of Edinburgh, before he entered Trinity College as ten-year man in 1781.13 John Hewlett, admitted to Magdalene in 1786, published The Holy Bible … with Critical, Philosophical and Explanatory Notes in 1812, a reviewer noting his work ‘will ever remain a monument of Christian zeal and erudition. ’14 Examples could be multiplied many, many times of ten-year men and whose publication of sermons, devotional works, catechetical guides, Church of England polemic and speculative theology, show extensive reading, thought, and habits of scholarship. The ten-year men also included those whose scholarship lay beyond the core focus of the English universities, their engagement in emerging academic fields perhaps a result of not having been habituated into the narrow scholastic world of undergraduate Oxford and Cambridge. There were a number of historians, antiquarians, philologists and scientists amongst their ranks. In the year he entered Cambridge as a ten-year man Joseph Bosworth published Elements of Anglo-Saxon Grammar. He finished his career as Rawlinson Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1858.15 John Hellins had established a considerable reputation as a mathematician before he entered Trinity College in 1789 and was to be elected a fellow of the Royal Society while he was a student.16 William Scoresby, a prominent Arctic explorer and scientist, published voluminously and was a founding member of British Association for the Advancement of Science.17 The introduction of an additional examination for ten-year men, administered by the Regius Professor of Divinity, in the mid-eighteen twenties does suggest that the university recognised the weakness of the degree’s assessment regime and attempted to implement some degree of quality control to bolster confidence, 18 probably prompted by the 1825 publication of a critical pamphlet by an anonymous internal critic and the series of reviews, counter-claims and newspaper correspondence that followed it, to which we will come to later. But undergraduate assessment methods were, as a whole, undergoing reform during this period.19 Stiffer quality control may have been implemented but the ten-year degree was not singled out for remedial attention. 2 In judging the abilities of ten-year men and perceptions of the degree we need, then, to be cautious. Contemporary interpretation of the statute meant that little was required of candidates, but a great many show a publishing track record that makes it clear that even if the university did little to support or encourage their studies, the award of a degree was not an inappropriate validation of skills and knowledge already possessed. Numbers of ten-year men About the first two centuries of the ten-year statute little can be discovered. If, as has been suggested, the seventeenth-century clergy almost all took degrees before ordination then there were few who could have benefited from its provisions excepting those far too poor to do so.20 Winstanley believed that the first man who actually proceeded to the degree was John Proudman who entered Jesus College as a fellow-commoner in 1708, and took a B.D. in 1719.21 From the latter part of the eighteenth century, however, the identities of ten-year men can be recovered using the Cambridge University Calendars, 22 editions of Graduati Cantabrigienses, 23 and Venn’s, Alumni Cantabrigiensis.24 Over the period 1770-1858 it is possible to recover 1,047 men who were entered under the ten-year statute, of whom 325 (31%) were awarded a B.D. Charting the dates of entry shows that in the latter part of the eighteenth century there were just a handful of entrants, recruitment averages being just under eight men a year in the seventeen-seventies and eighties, falling to about four men a year in the seventeen-nineties, and increasing just slightly in the eighteen-hundreds. But thereafter admissions increased significantly: nine admissions in 1810, but thirty-four in 1819.

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